Philip Linde linde.philip at gmail.com
Mon Mar 1 09:54:33 GMT 2021
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On 2/28/21, Caolan McMahon <caolan at caolan.uk> wrote:
Ideally, the two would be separate. Most suggestions I've seen so far were
to follow the opening ``` of a preformatted block with a mix of this data.
However, there is also the option of adding data after the closing ```
marker, keeping the two separate.
My suggestion would be to place type information after the opening ```, and
alt-text after the closing ```, for the following reasons:
Existing documents that use alt text as per the current spec will bebroken. Existing clients which MUST ignore any text following theterminating ``` won't be able to access the alt text on new documentsfollowing this suggestion. Seems like we'd be getting the worst ofboth worlds.
1. Even for accessibility, I suspect knowing the content type is more
practically useful to the client in the majority of existing cases. Most
ASCII art is purely decoration, and knowing the content type is text/x-ascii
(or similar) upfront is important so the screen reader can simply skip it.
How is the type more useful for accessibility than a generaldescription of its content? Would knowing in an art gallery whetheryou're standing in front of an oil painting or an aquarelle be moreuseful than knowing what the painting depicts? Need help browsing aphoto album? I'll help! I'll just read "photo, photo, photo, photo,photo..." to you until you've had enough.
I also object to the idea that the purely decorational should simplybe skipped over. If it's not there for a reason, the author should bethe one skipping over it. Presumably it *is* there for someinformational purpose in which case there's no reason that theinformation it communicates should be available to some users but notothers when alt text can be used to describe it to people who can'tsee it directly.
2. Knowing the content type upfront would allow clients to present streaming
data correctly using appropriate colours and escape codes for code
highlighting, for example.
A solution to a problem of its own making.
--Philip